The Sheltering Sky and the sorrow of memory: Reading Bertolucci through Deleuze
1998; Salisbury University; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema History and Criticism
ResumoBecause we don't know when we will die, we get think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything only happens a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon so deeply a part of your being that you can't imagine living without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you see full moon rise? Perhaps twenty; and yet it all seems so limitless. -Paul Bowles's concluding voice-over from The Sheltering Sky (1990) In talking about his adaptation of Paul Bowles's book The Sheltering Sky into film of same name, Bernardo Bertolucci claims that his goal was to arrive at some sort of 'physiology of feelings,' substituting [of book] with physical presence of Kit and Port [the two main of film] (Leys 54). This physiology of feelings can be understood as direct expression of imperceptible abstractions (inner voices) through medium of perception, that is, through physical presence of characters, in image and in sound, that we experience on screen. The attempt understanding this contradiction-the presence, and presentation, of imperceptible in perception-is point of departure for this paper. I'd like suggest that physiology of feelings that Bertolucci attempts achieve is entirely compatible with, and comprehensible in terms of, conditions and characteristics of modern cinema as Gilles Deleuze articulates them in second of his books on cinema, titled Cinema 2: The Time Image. Reduced their bare essentials, stories in cinema are necessarily articulated through two elements of perception; what we see, and what we hear. Deleuze argues that in Classic cinema (which he more or less defines as cinema of pre-war era), these elements combine create a field of in, and to, which of a film could act and react, so that viewer perceived therefore was a sensory-motor image in which he took a greater or lesser part by identification with characters (3). What perceived (saw, heard) was capable of being acted upon by them; perception could be extended into action. This unity of situation and falls into crisis in postwar period, beginning more or less with neo-realism; relation between what perceived, and their ability respond those perceptions, became ever more tenuous, until the character had become a kind of viewer . . . prey a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaged in action (3). In this new situation, elements of story, what is seen and heard, no longer produce a field of with which engage, but rather present us with what Deleuze refers as optical and sound which there can be no response or reaction, and which open out into a non-localisable relation: direct experience of time, and of thought. Bertolucci's physiology of feelings presents one aspect, or articulation, of this new state of affairs, where optical and sound situations presented in The Sheltering Sky open out into inner voices he describes, which are neither subjective impressions of characters, nor psychological motivations of their actions, but rather direct expression of diffuse intangibles, which we might call time and thought-or perhaps, as Bertolucci describes it, the sorrow of memory, pain of remembering (Leys 54). It must be said, however, that Bertolucci's film does not itself present us with a pure example of this cinema of time. Rather, it follows path of a transition, crisis of classic cinema as it gives way modern. As I've pointed out, crisis of classic cinema begins with rise of who are increasingly unable respond situations they find themselves in, becoming more and more a viewer, passing through a story rather than making it happen. …
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